Benefits of accreditation

Recognition: The prestige and trust acquired when a single agent, ENAC, grants accreditation can be asserted multiple times to the various publics such as clients or governments, diminishing the possibility of their being subject to multiple assessments by clients and the competent administrations. Accreditation is now present in virtually all of the different economic sectors, regardless of whether they operate in the regulatory or non-regulatory field, in Spain, the rest of Europe and the world.

Competitive advantage: Accreditation also provides an independent guarantee of the competence of your personnel. It can help you set yourself apart from the competition, thereby enabling you to compete with other organisations, even the largest ones. In addition, in some sectors accreditation is a requisite for securing authorisation to be able to provide certain services; in others it is a de facto licence that key purchasers deem necessary.

Access to markets: ENAC accreditation is recognised and accepted in over 90 countries across the world, thereby creating opportunities abroad as it is increasingly required by public and private sector organisations across the world.

Ongoing improvement: Accreditation is how assessors usually pinpoint areas for improvement, thereby providing the chance to improve the results of the organization on an ongoing basis.

Facilitates access to public procurement: As the use of accredited services is becoming more and more of a priority in public tender contracts.

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There is an extensive network of accredited public and private organizations whose job is to make a set of measures available to public powers that can be used to implement policies to achieve objectives of lower costs based on adopting best-practices.

Having accredited bodies:

Allows cost reduction that will decrease the central, autonomous and local government's need to use their own personnel for inspection tasks, since accreditation provides confidence in those organizations delegated to such tasks.

Enables the controller, both in preparing and applying the regulations, to concentrate its own resources on regulation aspects leaving the supervision of the compliance control system to a specialized independent organization (ENAC).

Provides a system to check and control the inspectors' activity who are charged without affecting the taxpayer.

Allows the Administration to participate, to the extent of their needs, in the assessment and monitoring processes established by ENAC.

Makes new regulation techniques easier to use which at the time ensures activities potentially affecting public confidence, health and safety or the environment are reliable.

Acts as a bridge between the market and the Administration significantly increasing trust in both areas.

Accreditation involves all levels of the Administration (European, State, regional and local) providing equal service and total performance in the economic sector, thereby generating trust between the different administrations.

If you have some responsibility for developing or establishing public policy we recommend that you consult our section "we work for the Administration", to see how ENAC can help you achieve your goals and needs.

A system of international agreements enables results from accredited conformity assessors to be more easily agreed upon by foreign markets. This acceptance helps to cut costs for manufacturers and exporters, reducing or eliminating the need to repeat tests in the importing country.

In Europe, Regulation (EC) No 765/2008, regulating accreditation in Europe, establishes that national authorities shall recognise the equivalence of the services delivered by those national accreditation bodies of each Member State and are to accept therefore the certificates/reports issued by assessment bodies accredited by them.

Enables the selection of reliable providers of these types of services

Assessment services possess a technical component that makes it very difficult for many companies to ascertain whether they are really competent for their needs. Furthermore, the outcome of the assessor’s work is a report or certificate which does not allow the evaluation of whether the activity has been performed properly. So accreditation is the most reliable parameter to select an assessor. Our website shows all accredited assessors and the specific activities in which they have shown their competence (scope of accreditation).

Protection from possible errors

Accredited assessors should have in place a system for processing complaints and its correct functioning is assessed by ENAC. In the event that bad practice by an accredited assessor is discovered, or if your complaints have not been properly dealt with, please let us know. ENAC will evaluate each case to determine whether the requisites for accreditation have been breached.